The Return of User Intent in Product

Our digital products have made it too easy to outsource our intent.

Over the past few years, we have been trained to rely on digital platforms to determine what we want, what we pay attention to, and what we care about.

Interfaces guide our navigation, buttons prompt our actions, algorithms direct our attention, recommendations inspire our interests. This constant companionship of our platforms, while convenient, subtly erodes our autonomy by continuously nudging us in the direction that they prescribed for us.

The state of our technology is a reflection of where we are now in the stages of the web's evolution.

The evolution of the web can be categorised in 4 distinct eras:

1. the reactive web

2. the proactive web

3. the predictive web

4. the prescriptive web

   
   

Initially, the web was a collection of static pages that merely reacted to user inputs. As UI/UX became more sophisticated, platforms became proactive, integrating suggestions and structured guidance into user experiences. Eventually, platforms could leverage big data and AI to become predictive, anticipating and serving our needs before we expressed them. The fourth and current phase of the web is moving towards prescriptive: reverse engineering the best path to drive prescribed intentions.

We are no longer in control of our intention, the platforms we use define it for us.

Our brains are programmed to seek frictionless experiences that minimise cognitive processing to preserve energy for survival and other higher order functions. The platforms we use are products of natural selection and market forces: we have come to refine and evolve the experiences we interact with based on what is most compelling and intuitive to us.

This outsourcing of our intention contributes to the addictive nature of the platforms we interact with. They enable us to bypass the internal process of figuring what we need, what we want, and what we value:

we go to Amazon to know what to buy

we go to Netflix to know what to watch

we go to Gmail to know what to do

we go to Instagram to know what to follow

we go to Twitter to know what to be interested in

….

It is not just engagement, gamification, or entertainment that keeps us coming back. It is the illusion that we do not have to figure out what to do, what to pay attention to, or what to care about that we find so pleasing. We can be guided mindlessly without much thought and effort throughout our day, and our brains reward us for it.

Over time, we increasingly rely on external guidance, to the point of losing touch with the desires and motivations that are intrinsic to us. We become more trusting of platforms than of ourselves. We doubt our own convictions, and accustom our brains to external validation.

While we are under the impression that the platforms we use serve our needs and interests, their algorithms and experiences are not necessarily designed to optimise for our benefit. They are designed to optimise for the desired outcome of the corporations behind them.

In the process of prescribing intent, algorithms shift our attention, values, and behaviour through strategic design and repeated exposure. Our brains are more malleable than we think, and we can be swayed more easily than we would like to admit. The discrepancy between the platform’s intent and the user’s intent becomes invisible over time, until they merge with each other. The brain no longer differentiates what originates from the inside or outside.

Outsourcing our intent to platforms has another under-discussed implication: it makes us more normal. Algorithms make generalisations about who we are based on pattern matching against other user segments. They reinforce norms by prescribing the most likely behaviour. This can result in abstracting the nuance of our individuality, and rounding out our persons into personas. Pushed to the extreme, the attribution of influenced behaviour to different groups can result in polarisation and fragmented spaces. AI will undoubtedly change that, but it still deserves to be stated.

There is a healthy balance between cognitive load minimisation and user control that needs to be calibrated. We have to be selective about the cognitive functions we decide to outsource to our technology, and hopefully the definition of our intention is not one of them.

I am fascinated by intention because intention is primary determinant of our lives. If life is path dependent based on the decisions we make, then our intention is what determines that path, and the outcome at the end of it.

When we lose control of our intention, we let others or the world define it for us, and we become mindless objects rather than mindful agents.

I have personally become more conscious about engaging with tools that serve my intention rather than tools that prescribe it.

More recently, the introduction and adoption of ChatGPT has been a fascinating counter-example of this trend. For the first time in a while, we are prompted by a minimal general purpose interface that greets us with “ask me anything”. Despite it being uncomfortable at first, the blank page serves as a forcing function to define our intention before engaging with it. It gives us back control of our intention with very little mechanism to override it.

While I am aware this is perceived as a “cold start problem” that needs solving, I find it interesting to witness if and how we will adjust. Perhaps it would not be a cold start problem if we were more attuned to our intention in the first place.

I wonder about a future in which we are given back the space to act from free will. Perhaps interfaces will go back to being reactive rather than prescriptive. Perhaps algorithms act from data they are intentionally fed rather than from data stored by default. Perhaps products are designed for less structured guidance, and more for boundless exploration. Perhaps we foster more curiosity and imagination, and less deterministic behaviour.

I do not doubt that we will continue to develop and engage with products that get to know us as much or better than we know ourselves. They make things frictionless and magical.

I just hope that we don’t lose touch with the parts of ourselves that define who we are, and the outcomes of our lives. It is too important to outsource.